Egypt: three sides vying for power

Daniel Greenfield writes that there are three sides involved in the Egyptian struggles for power.

Strip away the ideology and there are two sets of technocrats, both running on muddled Western ideas that never actually worked in the West. The Brotherhood pieced together an ideology out of the Koran and Mein Kampf. Their liberal opponents tend toward the same bankrupt Socialism that translate into massive bureaucracies. And the military which played the arbiter in their power struggles only cares about hanging on to its economic monopolies.

Think of it as three mob families, oligarchies where economic and clan interests overlap, fighting over the scrap heap of the Egyptian economy. The prizes are economic monopolies over everything from cigarettes to soap. And if that doesn't seem very romantic, in Syria the rebels are fighting over control of the country's most vital resource; bakeries.

Sadat and Mubarak chose to ally with the United States not because they believed in any common values, but because they were ready to settle down to running a backward country that might be mostly poor and ignorant, but is also reasonably stable and is able to count on American support. That plan came apart when Obama came into office and Sadat's killers became the future of Egypt.

The Egyptian military is mostly apolitical these days. And it is willing to play the two politicals, the two sets of technocratic elites, the liberals and the Islamists, against each other. Unlike the Turkish military, it's not here to be the guardian of secularism. Like the rest of Egypt, its military is a little bit Islamist and a lot corrupt. It puts family connections and personal profits first and then pays lip service to the Koran of the Islamists and the social justice of the liberals.

Today the Egyptian military cleared out the Islamists for the liberals. Tomorrow it may clear out the liberals for the Islamists.